Lose the Capes.

I figure you'd had enough of my yapping in the previous thousand-word post so I made this new post to post all the post-SPX stuff or whatever. Basically just a giant list of things I remember and want to mention because I felt like it was worth mentioning. Get ready for link spam.
- A few of the people I talked to last year were there, though a few of them came in for maybe a day or so. I had a few great conversations with the likes of Nick Abadzis and Tom Scioli, brief chats with Jamie Noguchi and KC Green, and met a ton of new folks who are all pretty cool.

- Only managed to see the last twenty minutes of the panel on Rep. John Lewis' comic biography "The March" which I bought a copy of. Rep. Lewis even signed my copy, as he did for everyone else who stopped by the Top Shelf booth to meet him and the artists who made his book happen. I talked with him a little, even thought about asking to interview him, but thought better of it since I'm horrific at interviews. Besides, he's on a tour for this so I imagine he's busy enough as it is.

- Met the guys over at Lost Art Books and that is a pretty awesome company. I go nuts for historical works and the publication industry really needs stuff like this. Not that there isn't already operations like this, but every little bit helps, and so far the illustrators that laid the groundwork for the modern era of comics exist only in second-hand references in Scott McClouds' books. It's great, then, when you can actually physically hold the past in your hands. These guys are dedicated to making sure you can get as close to the original work as you possibly can.

- Shout out to Adam Whittier and D.Rinlyo, who made some pretty neat comics. Whittier's got an interesting saga on the Ford Pinto, and Rinlyo's been peddling his bizarre take on newspaper comics that had me smiling on the outside and panicking on the inside. (That's whatever the opposite of an insult is in case anyone's confused.)

- Dirty Diamonds premiered at SPX, and while I failed to pick that up I did snag a copy of "Oh the Things You Won't Know!" It's pretty funny and the girls at that booth were pretty cool. Carey Pietsch and Claire Folkman, to be specific. Kelly Phillips was out and about when I bought her work.

- You saw that we tweeted the Ignatz, right? You know the prize is a brick, right? Michael DeForge won like three of them, so that's basically a free house right there.

- Ulli Lust is pretty cool and I had an awkward conversation with her in German which was nice. Apologies for the awkwardness! (Site is in German)

- I'll have some articles on the panels I attended, so I'll talk about the Center for Creative Studies and the Kickstarter discussion then.

Ok, kind of a haphazard set and I should have grabbed way more business cards. Hopefully as I get along in reviews that will change since I didn't always collect cards from people whose work I review.

I went over budget on this adventure, which I'm totally fine with because at least a handful of people are a few dollars richer. Next time I will try to get more of that cash out to smaller artists since I fell to the temptation of fancy book covers and professionally produced anthologies, while there were more than a few people there using SPX as their inaugural stab into the world of comics. I promise to spread the wealth more equally next time.

Next up: CCS workshop, Kickstarter panel, Sex Positivism in SPX, and a bunch of reviews.